In last week’s article, we looked at the importance of outsourcing and that you shouldn’t give up just because it doesn’t work the first time.

In this week’s article, I’d like to help you recognize some of the stumbling blocks and some of the solutions that have worked for myself and some of my clients/students/friends in the past.

Why do these things happen, anyway?

Tip #1: Most of the time the reason your outsourced project doesn’t work well is because you hired the wrong person (in other words, “the first person you come across”.)

If, in your excitement, you hire the first person you find, chances are you have hired the wrong person for the job.

You need to “hire slow” and “fire fast”.

What this means is you need to take the time to fill the position.

You’re hopefully going to be using this person more than once, or bringing them on part-time or full-time, so make sure they are a good fit before giving them work.

Tip #2: A second common problem is that people just don’t apply for your job. Most of the time this is because you put too much detail in your job posting, trying to attract the correct prospect.

I like to keep my job posting fun and light. I recommend you give just enough information to get the best prospects.

Then once I get them in the “door”, I give them the full project description and let them filter themselves out.

If you give too much info too soon, you can overwhelm people and they won’t even apply for your job.

NOTE: I’m talking about outsourcing to temporary contractors. If I’m hiring someone in-house I want to push them away with more info because they are about to become an integral part of my team.

Tip #3: Here’s another issue I hear all the time: “The person I hired just disappeared!” This can happen for a number of different reasons.

It could be you’re not paying them enough, they got a better offer, they’re having issues at home or with their other job, or maybe they took on too much work and can’t get to your project.

Many times they don’t want to hurt your feelings, so they just disappear.

You can minimize this by telling them in the beginning to be open and honest with you and to always communicate fully with you.

If they don’t communicate well at the start it might be time to move on to the next worker on your list. (you do have a list right?)

Tip #4: The last reason I’ll cover today is that many project don’t work out simply because your directions aren’t clear enough.

Remember that you need to spell everything out very clearly and concisely.

Make timeframes if necessary, or take screen casts of what results you are after. Make sure you could hand this to a 12-year-old, and they’d be able to understand exactly what you’re looking to have done.

In fact, that’s a great exercise… give the instructions to someone who would never be able to do the task, and see where they get hung up. Is it on simple things? If so re-write the job so anyone could do it.

If you have had any of these experiences in the past, I’d love to hear about them in the comments section. ALSO leave feedback if you have some solutions that work for you that I may have missed.

I read a quote the other day and it got me thinking. It went something like this:

“If you can’t afford the people to run the business for you, all you have is a job.” The author then went on to say, “I needed to get good people in here to do this for me. I couldn’t keep hiring people at as close to minimum wage as possible.”

The first part of the quote is so valuable and provides us with the first stumbling block most people face:

“If you can’t afford to pay people…”

If you can’t afford to pay people, you need to be honest with yourself. You have a job, not a business. Many people I talk to don’t realize that if they just paid someone else to do certain things, they’d be freed up to get more clients (or something equally important) and thus make more money. Maybe the real quote should be: “You can’t NOT afford to pay someone to do work for you.”

There is more gold in that quote, however, and it’s the second part. It’s actually only two words, but those two words really makes a huge difference:

“…good people…”

If you’re going to hire people to do your tasks for you, which you totally should do, you need to make sure they are “good people”.

Many of the people I’ve coached on the importance of outsourcing try it… but then give up because the person they hired didn’t do the job right, or couldn’t follow directions, or they flaked out and didn’t finish the task.

The owner then felt like they never should have outsourced in the first place. (The old, “I should have just done it myself, it would have been easier, and it would have been done correctly.”)

Most of them just goes back to doing it themselves. This by the way is the wrong solution.

We know outsourcing is important and that it will save/make us more money, so next week we’re going to look at how we can solve this problem.

Please help me out and leave a comment about your outsourcing successes and (if you’re like me) failures. I’d love to try and address some of these in my next article.

“Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.”― Albert Einstein

So assuming you, like me, enjoy systems that help you get more done, in an organized fashion, let’s take a shallow dive into the world of systems using a real world example.

A friend of mine called me up two weeks ago and she had to hire a new assistant. I asked if she had a system to help her with the process (because I just happen to have one) and of course she said, “no.”

I directed her to my webinar that outlines the system I use and told her to watch it. She decided that wasn’t the “best use” of her time and that she’d just do it herself. So here’s what happened:

1. She had to slog through a bunch of emails and see if they followed directions. (at least 50-100 emails)

2. Download their resumes and remember who they belonged to. (that’s a lot of resumes)

3. Read said resumes and see if they meet the qualifications set forth. (Who wants to read all of that?)

4. Pick out the best resumes.

5. Schedule interviews with these people. (that required some back and forth)

6. Hold the interviews.

7. Make a decision on who she wanted to hire.

8. Hire someone.

Whew… I’m exhausted just writing all of that out. I can’t imagine if I had to actually DO all of that. What if you had a hiring system that would allow you to cut out the first 4 steps and automate all of that? That’s where the bulk of the work comes from.

With the system I use, I set up email filters and auto-responders so, I don’t even know the person is there until they’ve jumped through 2 different hoops. This weeds out a lot of the “tire kickers” or those that can’t follow directions.

Imagine only having to read 10-15 emails, instead of 100. How much time would that save? Then imagine if you had a Google Form where the person answer questions that you really want to know the answer to. That’s the next step in the process. They fill out the form and you score them based on their answers. Everyone is all in the same place so you can compare them really easily.

Then you pick out only the best and set up an interview (I use Skype for this.) I send everyone to a booking link on Doodle.com and let them pick the best time for them (out of the choices I give them) so I don’t have to set anything up.

Then I hold the interviews and pick the best person. Viola. Done.

This process takes about 1 week to get everything done, BUT you know what? It runs in the background while I’m getting actual work finished. Had my friend taken 1 hour to watch the video and then set up the system she could have kept working on closing deal, getting new clients, and making more money.

This is the power of systems.

By the way if you’d like to learn the system I use to hire new staff (everyone from writers, to designers, to developers) let me know in the comments section and maybe I’ll throw together a webinar teaching you exactly how.

In my article, Hire The Smile, I shared some advice I received from my first mentor… how important a smile is when you are hiring people. This is perfect if you’re hiring long-term employees, but it’s a little more difficult when it comes to finding outsourced workers.

It CAN, however, be done!

Today I’m going to talk about a few of the various places you can go to hire outsourced workers and also cover some of the pros and cons of each as I’ve worked with them over the years.

oDesk UpWork (formerly “oDesk”) is one of the largest online workplaces where you can go to hire freelance workers for everything from data entry, research, graphic design, web dev, etc.

Pros of oDesk UpWork:

A huge pool of very talented people to chose from that will work within your “reasonable” budget.

They have qualification testing that workers can go through to prove their skill level.

Can invite highly qualified people to work on your projects.

Can get work turned around very quickly.

Can hire the same worker over and over again.

They have the ability to track the work that’s being done.

Cons of oDesk UpWork

If your project is an open listing, you’ll get a lot of low quality leads/bids.

Sometimes agencies will apply for your job so it’s more difficult to build a relationship with the worker.

Miscommunications with your worker (this really isn’t an oDesk issue, but rather an issue that many business owners have when they are trying to outsource work).

Overall: I love using oDesk and have used it for many different projects, especially with web dev projects, design projects, and responsive theme projects. It really helps if you already have an idea about what you need for your project. It also helps if you already have some people to invite to your project.

It’s like a combo of Fiverr (job descriptions) and oDesk (available projects).

There’s a really good talent pool to choose from.

They have a good ratings system.

The turn around is really fast.

They have an iPhone app so you can check your jobs, create a listing, etc, on the go.

Cons of PeoplePerHour:

I’m still new to using PPH so I don’t have any issues to point out at this time.

Overall: This is my new “go to” website for outsourcing tasks and projects. I’ve had great results and received some amazing work. I’ve also built up some relationships with workers, so I can go straight to them (through PPH) to see if they want to work on my project.

You get to see the designs all up front (while your contest is running) and then chose the best one.

You can give feedback and have them make tweaks to their design until you’re happy (while your contest is running).

Cons of 99Designs:

There are a lot of add-on costs to get your full project up and running.

If you get a high response to your contest, you’ll have to spend a lot of time going through all the designs and leaving feedback. This can eat up a lot of time. (A few projects I ran took full days just going back and forth with feedback for all the various designers.)

Overall: 99Designs was great to use for design projects in the past, but for me it takes too much work going back and forth with all the different designers. I’d rather just hire one or two and see who does a better job on a simple task, then hire the best one for my full project.

Can have small tasks done by a lot of different people all over the world.

Can run batch projects and get a lot done in a short amount of time.

Really great prices.

A huge pool of people to pull from.

Great for repetitive projects that you need done over and over again.

Cons of Amazon’s Mturk:

You’ll get people that don’t follow directions, because they are just trying to make the small amount of money you offer and then move on.

You have to filter out the low-quality worker and block them from your future tasks.

You need to be careful that you’re getting original work. Some people will try to be tricky and use copy/paste work.

Overall: MTurk is an amazing platform that has the ability to get a lot of work done in small amounts of time. It’s great to use for repetitive work, but you have to make sure to boot people that are not producing good results.

You can use CraigsList in your local area as well as overseas. (Hint: CL has a Philippines section.)

Can get really competitive rates especially if you try posting your ad in different locations.

Cons of CraigsList:

You’ll get a lot of people who didn’t actually read your job listing before applying for your job.

There are definitely some crazies on there. (Have any good stories? Share them in the Comments!)

It takes time to filter through all the applications, unless of course you have a filtering system. (NOTE: We just happen to have one for you here: http://marketersbraintrust.com/findwriters/.)

Overall: I use CraigsList to hire employees all the time! Using it in conjunction with the filtering process allows me to have an almost hands-off hiring process. I’ve found some amazing writers, designers and developers on CraigsList over the years.

Honorable Mentions that you’re more than welcome to go explore on your own (and let me know how you like them in the Comments below, okay?)

For Writers:

These are just a few of my thoughts and some of the sites that I use on a regular basis. If you have any good sites to suggest, please do so in the Comments section below.

Feel free to ask any questions you have as well as comment on any successes or failures you’ve had with outsourcing work.

Are you having trouble handing your work off to someone else? Do you find that it’s just easier to do it all yourself? Do you hate putting together workflow systems? If you’ve answered “yes” to any of these questions this post is for you.

I’ve been spending the better part of a week putting together a new workflow system for a service we are offering and I realized something that you might also suffer from.

It doesn’t have a clinical name, but I think it should totally be admitted into the DSM one of these days. I’ll have to figure out a name for it. (EDIT: how about “Obvious-osis-itis”?)

When we are outlining systems, for others to follow, we take for granted all the little actions that it takes to accomplish things that we no longer think about. They become second nature to us, like they are obvious, but to someone new it’s totally foreign and needs to be spelled out to the “T”

If I said to you, “Hey let’s go grab some dinner, you drive.” What would you do? (Besides wonder why I never drive and why we’re still friends.)

Chances are you’d grab your keys, wallet/purse, and jump in the car and off we’d go. BUT… it’s actually more in depth than that.

If we break it down you’ll see that you really did much more. To someone that’s never driven a car before (first off, should they really be driving? probably not) there are a lot of different steps to follow.

So what seems like second nature, get in the car and go, has quite a few steps that need to be explained for the person who’s going to be doing the work. If you take the time to outline all these steps once, you’ll save a lot of time, money on training, and you also have an accountability process built into your workflow.

A real world example:

Back in the day, when I was building my 2nd Digital marketing agency and we were scaling to $1MM+/year, I asked one of my partners for a list to help me outline the workflow on something they are an expert at.

Our goal was to be able to scale and eventually have someone help them with their work.

They gave me a list of 10 steps and that was a great start. Once we started working together, to outline everything, our end result was a full series of 29 steps that made it impossible for anything to fall through the cracks.

If you want to do this for yourself it really helps if you have someone work with you. Grab a colleague, co-worker, or friend and they can (hopefully) play dumb. That will force you to break things down into their most simple steps and will allow ANYONE to be able to perform the task(s) at hand.

As far as outlining your workflows. I find it’s helpful to use a software to manage them all. I really like Trello but there are any number of softwares you can use and they all have their pluses and minuses. Just depends on your needs.

The sooner you start building workflows the sooner you can hand your workload off to others, track what’s being done and what’s falling behind, and you can really scale your projects (read: save time and make more money.)

I’ll leave you with this quote from Einstein:

“Things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

In the example I shared with you it may seem like expanding our list of “ToDos” from 10 to 29 was making things more complex because we added more steps, but in reality we were making things run much more simple. And as an added bonus we were able to save A TON of time and money when it came to training.

If you’ve been working on your outreach methods and following a proven strategy but are still not seeing the kind of conversions you were hoping for it may be time to re-evaluate the content of your existing ads.

Ads that focus on reaching a segment of your audience (your IDEAL CLIENTS) are significantly more successful than using ads with a very broad, generalized (and often boring) messaging.

There are two primary aspects of ad of development: content and composition. Considering each of these carefully before designing your next ad will dramatically improve its effectiveness.

Content

Ad content should be goal-driven; to develop ads that inspire action, first determine what the pain that your ideal client has is. Then what is the action they need to take to solve their pain.

AND you should know why you want your audience to take it. (besides just making money, that is.)

The content of remarketing ads is driven by the user’s last action on the site and should address the next logical step in the process – if the user downloaded an ebook on email marketing, we know they want to use email in their business.

So we know their pain point is around not being good at email. SO… our ad could direct them to an email template to make their emails convert better.

Ads that are intended to support remarketing efforts can increase sales by driving more traffic to the site or by capturing and maintaining attention.

The ads for each of these goals requires a unique approach, however.

Ads intended to increase sales by driving traffic should send your potential leads to a specific, relevant landing page (url) where a cookie/pixel can be assigned.

If the goal is to capture and maintain the attention of your audience, focus on understanding your audience’s needs/pains and develop ad content that offers solutions to those needs/pains.

Composition

While ad composition is heavily influenced by the medium, there are some common elements to consider. First, the offer must be prominently displayed – free videos, downloads, shipping, gifts and discounts are all effective offers. Second, the offer must act as hook to excite the viewer into action. A free download could be a buying guide; free consultations may teach a potential customer how to implement the product.

With the offers and actions in check, there are a few medium-specific considerations to incorporate into your perfect ad:

How to Use the Components of an Ad

Image Capture their attention and get them to stop in their tracks

Eye Catching Headline Now they’re stopped we want to pique their interest and get them to read the first line of our ad. (SUCK THEM IN!)

Compelling Body This should build out the story and have them salivating for a solution to the problem that’s been addressed.

Differentiator By addressing their pain, acknowledging that they aren’t alone in that pain, and giving them a solution you will stand head and shoulders above your competition who use the generic (and incredibly boring “Name, Rank, and Serial Number” type ads.

Not to mention (but totally to mention) it doesn’t offer the reader ANY VALUE what-so-ever.

SO….

When used correctly, both print and digital ads are an extremely powerful tool for supporting business growth.

The key is to determine your goals and then develop ad content that meets your audience on their terms (read: where they are at in their pain) while inspiring a specific action (What they can do to solve/remove their pain.)

Increasing site traffic is the primary goal of many marketing initiatives.

For some businesses, their site serves as a primary sales engine through which customers purchase products (or services) without ever having interacted with a sales person; for others, their site provides potential and current customers with information on product offerings and specials.

Whether you want to drive traffic to your site to increase sales or simply to build brand recognition, there are specific methods to use to ensure that you are getting the most out of your marketing dollars.

1. Remarketing

Reaching out to the segment of your potential client base that has already interacted with your brand (either by reading a blog post or checking out your product pages) is great way to increase sales. As discussed in Use the Ripple Effect to Make Waves, a robust remarketing strategy is crucial to optimizing your marketing budget.

Use cookies to keep track of how users are interacting with your content. This allows you to send targeted ads to viewers while they are surfing the web. The best way to use this type of marketing is to drive traffic to a blog post or other piece of content that is similar to something the target has already viewed. It is also a great way to announce a new product offering; especially if you are targeting leads that viewed your product pages but did not make a purchase.

Facebook, Google, Bing and third-party services, such as Perfect Audience, provide a channel for reaching your cookied viewers with targeted ads based on their previous interactions with your content.

2. Pay-Per-Click

Pay-per-click methods are effective for reaching potential leads based on the specific key word searches they perform. The success of a pay per click campaign is rooted in research – to be most effective, you must understand who is searching on your keywords (demographics) and what they need from your business (psychographics).

Google, Bing and Facebook provide the greatest exposure because they are so widely used. Google and Bing provide access to viewers searching for specific keywords and Facebook allows you to target users based on specific behaviors, interests, demographics and psychographics.

3. Native Advertising

Native advertising is slightly different than the previous two methods we discussed. Instead of using a traditional ad, native advertising uses content to sell a service through education. The video, article or podcast teaches its audience about a specific topic that is related to your service. The goal is to demonstrate your expertise and instill confidence. (Basically you’re showing them that you can help them BEFORE you’ve even worked with them.)

Based on your exhibited abilities, your potential customer will contact you to purchase your product or service because they understand and desire the benefits.

Increasing site traffic is a clear goal, one that can easily be measured through analytics. As you implement new strategies, keep track of what is working and what is not so that you can adjust your strategies and develop a method that works best for your audience and your business. So what are you waiting for…maybe the perfect ad? Well stay tuned because we are going there next!

The pressure to produce articles, podcasts, videos and infographics that are not only helpful, insightful, entertaining and thought-provoking but that also keep people coming back for more is intense.

Which makes it is easy to see how tempting it is to allow talented individuals to post their content on your site. After all, it feels like a win-win situation – they get the exposure and you get the traffic, right?

Well, there is a little more to it than that…

Let’s take a brief look at the long and tenuous marriage of content and advertising. In the early ad days, print marketing had it pretty easy – write a few articles, take some pictures and then just keeping adding pages based on the number of ads you’re able to sell.

Then radio came along and we needed newscasts and stories to keep people hooked long enough to hear the commercial.

When TV broke onto the scene it was soap operas to sell to the housewife and cartoons to get kiddos begging mom and dad for toys.

In all cases, it was the intrinsic value of the content that allowed the advertising campaigns to be successful.

The shows always ended with a hook before going to break to make sure that their viewers and listeners would stay tuned – not wanting to miss a moment of the show, the audience would listen to every commercial.

The shows and articles were (and still are) a platform – a place for you to host your ad. But what if the platform becomes so successful that it breeds more products?

Think of how many cheap cartoons have been produced just to fill time slots in between commercials for toys and cereal – now consider how many of those shows have gone on to fill the toy aisles of big box retailers with action figures, accessories and super-hyped toys. Owning your content (your platform) ensures that you will profit from those successes.

Owning your content also ensures that you have 100% control over the message. You can ensure that your message is focused on your potential client’s interests and not necessarily on the product.

By controlling the platform on which your advertisement is positioned, you create an atmosphere that is receptive to your pitch.

Finally, if all of this content creation is getting you down and you are worried that you just can’t keep up, there is another option. Curate. If you are careful and deliberate about this, linking back to the blogs, websites, and videos of others you can position yourself as an authority and build a fan base.

Connecting people to great content through your social media (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest) builds relationships.

Think of it as the Oprah(tm) effect– Oprah is not an authority on cooking or psychology or finances –but she knew how to find the very best in the industry and then she gave them platform on her show. She was never worried about creating competition; instead, she built trust with her audience and an empire in the process.

To put this into practice, find a few great businesses that offer services that may be useful to your audience. (HINT: Ask yourself, “What other problems do my ideal clients have that I could help them solve?”)

If you are a personal injury lawyer, you may want to link to a chiropractor, a motor cycle mechanic, a bicycle shop, a dog trainer, and/or a bankruptcy lawyer.

Owning your own content is like investing in the real estate of your business. If you put in the research, build value and retain ownership, it is an investment that will continue to pay dividends for years to come.